Diary of a suburban edible garden, February 2017.

I know it's only February but I've already had enough garden excitement to last me the whole year! 

Firstly I enlisted the help of the husband and we emptied the compost bin.  There's really nothing as satisfying and glee-making as homemade compost, it worked perfectly and made beautiful compost! 

We spread the compost over most of the main garden raised bed, with really thin layers of autumn leaves and hay underneath, to create a bit of a mulchy, nutrient and structure adding, and protective layer. 

But the excitement didn't stop there!  I weeded and refilled my front garden lasagna raised beds, scattering the veg plant leaves over the soil, then autumn leaves, hay, compost and finally a layer of some topsoil I had left over from when I first made the beds.  They're all ready for planting up now. 

 

And then Joe decided to demolish a funny little walled area at the back end of the garden.  There was a tree stump in it and a double layer of bricks in a square round the edge, and then some big chunks of mortar to chip away too.  I'm pleased he did this, because once we've got the paths sorted out I want my little tool shed to go in that space.  I don't have a before photo, but this is the space now. 

We also dismantled the compost bin, it was too big for us, and a bit rickety around the joints.  Mum passed on this round compost bin to us, I remember it coming from my Gran's garden, and she died when I was in my early teens, so it's obviously a quality, long lasting item!

And even more excitement - we rented a skip and Joe dismantled the old green shed.  It was about to fall over and looked disgusting.  I'm so glad to be rid of it.  We'll save up for a new studio shed (which may take some time!), Joe did a jewellery degree and he wants to get back into it and have the space to do it.

Behind the old shed was about 2 feet of rubbish (4 children's bikes, bags of rubble, buckets, boxes, bags of junk, a wheelbarrow!) and a bank of soil mixed in with rubble.  We think the rubble is from the old coal shed.  Once Joe's dug through and removed the rubble we can hopefully take the bank way back, prune the hedge and give ourselves some extra garden.

I planted some bulbs, allium and oxalis, and some bargain echinacea - 3 plants for 99p from Aldi.

I planted my first veggie seeds too, in cut down loo rolls in this fabulous cupcake box I nicked from work to use as a propagator.  I've done a bit of everything I'm most excited to grow, just to get started, and I'll plant more over the coming weeks.  Here we have kale, pink chard, yellow mange tout, lazy housewife beans and minipops sweetcorn.

All my seedlings live in the conservatory for now.  In the terracotta pots are peppers, tomatoes, giant bulgarian leeks and a couple of lipstick peppers that have hung on since last year.

I've planted some pretty polyanthus too.

How are your gardens this month?  I hope they're as Exciting as mine! 

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